Nationalism and Culture by Rudolf Rocker

"Incorruptible" and his Jacobin church congregation, but their veneration-urge moved along different lines, and they would acknowledge no higher power than the state, which to them was the holiest of holies. They were good patriots, and when they spoke of the "Nation," they were enflamed by the same religious ardor as the pious Catholic when he speaks of his God. But they were not the legislators of the country, and consequently they lacked that famous "higher understanding" which, according to Rousseau, transcends the mental grasp of ordinary men and whose decision the legislator is careful to have confirmed from the mouth of the godhead.
    Robespierre, of course, possessed this "higher understanding." He felt himself to be the lawgiver of "the Republic, one and indivisible" j consequently he called atheism "an aristocratic affair," and its adherents, hirelings of William Pitt. Just so today, in order to excite the horror of
    ^ Jean Jacques Rousseau, Le contrat social. Book II, ch. 7.
    the faithful, do the partisans of Bolshevism denounce as "counterrevolutionary" every idea which does not suit them. In times of excitement such a designation is deadly dangerous and tantamount to "Strike him dead J he has blasphemed against God!" This the Hebertists, too, had to learn, as so many before and after them. They were believers, but not orthodox believers j consequently the guillotine had to convince them as formerly the stake did the heretics.
    In his great speech before the convention in defense of the belief in a higher being Robespierre hardly developed an original thought. He referred to Rousseau's Social Contracty on which he commented in his usual long-winded manner. He felt the necessity of a state religion for Republican France, and the cult of the Supreme Being was to serve him by putting the wisdom of his policy in the mouth of the new godhead, and endowing it with the halo of the divine will.
    The Convention resolved to publish that speech all over France, to translate it into all languages, thus giving the abominable doctrine of atheism a deadly blow, and to announce to the world the true confession of faith of the French people. The Jacobin Club in Paris made haste to announce its veneration of the Supreme Being in a special memorial declaration. Its content, like that of Robespierre's speech, was rooted completely in Rousseau's ideas. It referred with special gusto to a passage in the Fourth Book of the Social Contract which said:
    There exists consequently a purely civic confession of faith and the settling of its Articles is exclusively a matter for the head of the state. It is here a question not so much of religious doctrine as of universal views without whose guidance one can be neither a good citizen nor a faithful subject. Without being able to compel anyone to believe in them, the state can banish anyone who does not believe, not as a godless one, but as one who has violated the Social Contract and is incapable of loving the law and justice with his whole heart, incapable in case of necessity of sacrificing his life to his duty. If anyone, after the public aeceptance of these civic articles of faith, announces himself as an infidel, he deserves the death penalty, for he has committed the greatest of all crimes. He has knowingly perjured himself in the face of the law.
    The young French Republic was a hardly established power, still without tradition, which had, besides, arisen from the overthrow of an old system of rulership whose deeply rooted institutions were still alive in large sections of the people. It was, therefore, incumbent on her more than on any other state to establish her young power in the religious consciousness of the people. It is true that the wielders of the young power had endowed the state with divine qualities and had raised the cult of the "Nation" to a new religion which had filled France with wild enthusiasm.
    But that had happened in the intoxication of the great Revolution, whose